Google DeepMind In Talks With UK National Grid To AI To Boost Electric Supply Efficiency

Google’s DeepMind division is in talks with the National Grid to bring artificial intelligence (AI) into its operations, with the goal of improving energy efficiency across the UK.

The talks are at rather early stages, with both firms exploring how AI and such smart systems can be best deployed when it comes to supplying electricity across Britain.

Electric DeepMind

“We are in the very early stages of looking at the potential of working with DeepMind and exploring what opportunities they could offer for us,” a spokesperson for the National Grid told City AM.

Not revealing much to what the talks had yielded so far a DeepMind spokesperson noted that AI certainly has a role to play in the supply of energy.

There’s huge potential for predictive machine learning technology to help energy systems reduce their environmental impact,” they said.

“One really interesting possibility is whether we could help the National Grid maximise the use of renewables through using machine learning to predict peaks in demand and supply.”

Google currently uses DeepMind’s work on AI, specifically deep learning artificial neural networks, which essentially is digital attempt to replicate human brain picks apart and processes data, to smartly manage the cooling of its data centres, which are often praised for their energy efficiency.

As such, there is nothing to prevent DeepMind from taking its existing machine and deep learning algorithms and tweaking an artificial neural network model to work with data supplied by the National Grid and the predicted desired outputs of improved energy efficiency.

DeepMind is already achieving interesting things with its AI development, including a set of AIs that con create and decrypt their own encryption keys in a dynamic fashion, making them very difficult to crack.

The AI company is also working with the NHS to find way to improve patient care through the use of smart technology in healthcare apps and aiding Royal Free NHS Trust in the development of a diagnostic tool that can spot patterns in large amounts of patient data and better aid hospital staff in monitoring patents with kidney disease.

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